In announcing its deal to buy Palo Alto-based CV Therapeutics for $1.4 billion, Gilead Sciences followed a path it started down when it realized that its dominance in the HIV-drug market probably wouldn't sustain the Foster City company forever.

It still develops some of its own products, including one designed to boost the effectiveness of other drugs. And while it considers its own researchers first-rate, "it's hard to believe that we're going to be the best at everything," said John Milligan, president and chief operating officer of Gilead, which announced its deal with CV Therapeutics on Thursday.

Starting in 2006, Gilead has bolstered its lineup of treatments largely by acquiring other companies. Milligan said the company will continue looking for other possible deals, though probably not this year, since it will probably take months for CV Therapeutics and Gilead to combine their operations, assuming the Palo Alto company's stockholders approve the deal.

"Gilead has historically been the leader in biotech in HIV and they have done amazingly well," said Edward Nash, an analyst with investment bank Merriman Curhan Ford. But with competition growing in the HIV-treatment area, he added, "they are continuing to keep themselves fresh" by snapping up other companies with different drugs.

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Gilead was founded with the idea of focusing on nucleotides, genetic material that can be modified to inhibit disease-causing proteins. After laboring for years in the red, its efforts began to pay off in 1996 when the FDA approved its drug Vistide to treat a condition related to the herpes virus, which can cause eye damage.

A year later, the FDA approved Gilead's AmBisome, for life-threatening fungal infections. And in 1999, the FDA also approved Gilead's Tamiflu, which Gilead has licensed to the Swiss company Roche in exchange for royalty payments. Intended largely to treat people who get seasonal flu, Tamiflu has been stockpiled by many countries as a possible antidote for a major bird-flu outbreak.

But the company primarily owes its commercial success to its HIV drugs — Viread, Emtriva, Truvada and Atripla — which won FDA approval respectively in 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2006.

Those drugs dominate the HIV-drug market and provide the vast majority of Gilead's revenue, which totaled $5.34 billion in 2008, a 26 percent increase from 2007. On the basis of those sales, Gilead is the world's third-biggest biotech company, behind Amgen of Thousand Oaks and Genentech of South San Francisco, according to data compiled by investment bank Jefferies & Co.

To stay profitable, Gilead has been eager to branch out.

In November 2006, it paid $2.5 billion cash for Colorado-based Myogen, obtaining the formula for a pulmonary arterial hypertension drug, which Gilead won FDA permission to sell a year later.

That same year, it spent $365 million for Corus Pharma of Seattle, which was developing drugs for respiratory and infectious diseases, including a treatment to help people with cystic fibrosis breathe.

Now, if its deal to buy CV Therapeutics is approved, Gilead will acquire a variety of new drugs. CV sells Ranexa, a drug to ease chest pain in patients suffering from heart ailments, and Lexiscan, which helps patients who can't exercise on treadmills generate the blood flow needed to check them for coronary artery disease. It also is developing potential treatments for diabetes, lung problems and other ailments.

But others say the two companies should make a nice fit. And they generally praise Gilead's top brass as a savvy bunch who understand that it is risky to pin their future profitability solely on HIV drugs.

In a note to his clients, Alan Carr, an analyst with investment bank Needham & Co., said Ranexa should sell well under Gilead's control and that "the deal makes strategic sense in our opinion."